Empress of Fashion

by Amanda Mackenzie Stuart

  The same people, and many others, appeared for dinner at 550 Park Avenue. “What she did was mix people up,” said Bob Colacello of Interview. “It was partly connected with the museum but not entirely. . . . She had the curiosity of a truly great hostess.” Diana was at Studio 54 with Halston for Bianca Jagger’s birthday party when she rode in on a white horse, and a year later Bob Colacello found her there again, shimmying away at Elizabeth Taylor’s birthday party. “It really becomes more like pagan Rome every day,” said Colacello. “I should hope so, Bob!” replied Diana. Leo Lerman, who was there too, was less convinced it was all for the good. “Supplicating figures on the pavement kneeling, begging to come in,” he wrote in his diary on the same night. “The Studio 54 rings of Hell. Beardsley out of Moreau. . . . Diana Vreeland on the floor gyrating and swaying and shaking. A red, green, gold, glittering blackness.”

  Diana’s friends and acquaintances flowed through the Costume Institute, and often joined her for a sandwich lunch. It was “a world of wonders” for Ferle Bramson, who found herself being kissed by Mick Jagger one minute, and rescued by the boys from Warhol’s Factory the next. (“Mick is the most attractive man in New York when he’s had one or two days’ rest,” said Diana.) Annie Hopkins Miller, who had worked with Diana as an accessories editor at Bazaar and was now a volunteer at the museum, worried protectively that Mrs. Vreeland’s courtiers saw her as a camp joke. There may have been those who did, but neither Nicholas Haslam nor Bob Colacello agreed. “She was too strong a personality to be camp,” said Haslam, who called her frequently, long after life took him away from New York. Colacello agreed: “I really felt very close to her—she was like a grandmother and though at least one of my grandmothers was also rather original, it was difficult to find anyone as sophisticated and original as Mrs. Vreeland.”

  Diana could become so wrapped up in her friends’ lives that she became positively bossy. One friend thought she had missed her calling as a doctor, given the frequency with which she recommended pills, laid out health regimens, and cracked her friends’ backs. She gave most people she liked a nickname. The photographer Priscilla Rattazzi was known as “Wopola.” She was not politically correct. “This was before the days of political correctness but it was refreshing even then,” said Bob Colacello. “You’re so lucky you’re a wop,” she was fond of saying to him. “Because, when a wop walks into a room, it lights up.” (Richard Avedon, on the other hand, found Diana’s anti-Semitic tone extremely distasteful.) She became involved in friends’ problems. “If you told her about a difficulty over dinner she would follow up a day or two later,” said Haslam. “She certainly didn’t forget.” “She was very good at pep talks,” said Colacello, who noted that she could be disapproving, too. “She was not an intellectual. Most of the conversation when you went to dinner consisted of her telling stories about the past or about people we both knew. It was, really, gossip.” Amid all this, one friendship in the 1970s stood out—with Andy Warhol’s business partner Fred Hughes.

  Against a 1970s background of huge deficits and spiraling crime, the avant-garde acquired a new edge and intensity. Its ringmaster, Andy Warhol, moved his Factory from East Forty-Seventh Street downtown to 33 Union Square West in 1968. Diana had known Warhol for years, since the days when he came into Bazaar with his drawings of shoes, but the relationship was always uneasy. Diana found Warhol a puzzle; and as he became an international star, Warhol preferred not to be reminded of the days when he was just “Andy Paperbag.” Though Diana was pleased by Warhol’s success, she did not warm to the Factory scene until she met Fred Hughes, whose name first appeared in her engagement diary in the summer of 1973, when he came for dinner with the interior designer Sister Parish. Though Diana was in her seventies and Fred Hughes in his early thirties, the bond became very close—so close that friends thought Diana was infatuated—or even in love—with him. Hughes reminded many people of Reed, and she adored the way he looked. “Fred was unbelievably elegant,” said Colacello. “He modeled himself on the Duke of Windsor—or Fred Astaire—and it suited him! He invented a kind of Factory uniform—pressed jeans, suit jacket, expensive shoes, which meant you could sit on a loft floor one minute and be uptown for dinner the next. Everyone copied him, including Andy.”

  Hughes was mysterious about his origins, but he later turned out to be the son of a furniture salesman, to have been born in Texas, and raised in Dallas and Houston. He was not related to Howard Hughes, though this did not stop him sporting black armbands when “Uncle Howard” died. But he was also an impressive autodidact who was capable of absorbing large amounts of information in a very short time, and he was a delightful and stimulating companion. He studied History of Art at the University of St. Thomas in Houston, a department almost entirely financed by the philanthropists Jean and Dominique de Menil, who were art collectors and beneficiaries of the Schlumberger oil-equipment fortune. The de Menils were charmed by Hughes and helped him into a job with the Iolas Gallery in Paris. In return, Hughes helped out the de Menils with their art collection in Manhattan when he was back in the States. During one of these visits he was introduced to Warhol. They struck up an instant friendship (there is no suggestion of anything more), and he started working at the Factory shortly afterward.

  Hughes was just the sort of business partner Warhol needed. He was a catalyst for new ideas and a point of equilibrium in the Factory’s unbalanced world. His polished manner, politesse, and intellectual curiosity did much to counteract the creepy impression made by Warhol. One of his first acts was to persuade the de Menils to sit for portraits by Warhol, along with their friend the architect Philip Johnson. During the 1970s, Warhol’s portraits generated a great proportion of the Factory’s income, while Interview magazine became the vehicle for drawing the young, the famous, the rich, and the interesting into Warhol’s orbit. Hughes was responsible for ensuring that money flowed into the magazine and for seeking out portrait commissions. Colacello, Interview’s editor, has said that it was Hughes who set Warhol on the road to riches, and that without him Warhol would not have turned into the global superstar artist he subsequently became. “Fred engineered the rise of Andy Warhol from the demimonde to the beau monde,” he observed. Hughes was very attached to Diana—he “loved the idea of her,” said one friend—but she also gave him a great deal of business help because she so adored him. She critiqued issues of Interview and issued advice to which Hughes and Colacello listened. Just as important, Diana went to great lengths to help Hughes find patrons for Warhol’s portraits, bridging the gap between the downtown avant-garde and uptown riches in a way that set her apart from anyone else of her generation. “Despite the underlying ambivalence and mistrust between the Empress of Fashion and the Pope of Pop,” wrote Colacello, “it was her stamp of approval that put him in the middle of Park Avenue society in the middle of the seventies. It was Mrs. Vreeland, more than anyone else, who pushed Andy, and Fred and me, by introducing us to her swell friends at her small dinners and by bringing us to the small dinners of her swell friends.”

  In time Diana’s passion for Hughes would lead to serious tension with Warhol; but when she asked Hughes to accompany her to Japan in 1975, Warhol was enthusiastic, saying it would be good for business. Diana was invited to Japan by the Museum of Costume in Kyoto, which was showing The Tens, the Twenties, the Thirties at the suggestion of Issey Miyake. Diana was asked as guest of honor and encouraged to bring a friend. She asked her grandson Nicky to accompany her, but when it became clear he wanted to bring his girlfriend, Priscilla Rattazzi, Diana asked Hughes as well. They all stayed in a sumptuous hotel in Kyoto and were treated like visiting royalty. Diana looked at Japan in “wonderment,” said Nicky. There was nothing jaded about her reaction. She breathed it all in. She particularly liked the sight of men in kimonos. There was only one moment when she was thrown off balance. At a reception in her honor a huge box was carried in and flung open to reveal two Sumo wrestlers who tumbled out onto the floor. She collected
her wits and proclaimed: “The pink babies!” Privately concerned that they might be feeling humiliated, she subjected the Sumo wrestlers to an in-depth interview about their training, their diet, and how they kept their skin so soft. On another evening they all had dinner in a geisha house. Diana was fascinated by the geishas’ clothes and hair and thrilled to discover that their makeup was all from Revlon. She thought her Japanese hosts’ use of color in the exhibition was bewitching.

  Each morning of their stay Diana remained in her bedroom till lunchtime. Hughes went off walking on his own, while Nicky and Priscilla, both aspiring photographers, spent every morning in Kyoto taking pictures. This led to one disagreement between Diana and Nicky. She had no interest in the way twentieth-century Japan jostled with traditional Japanese life and was horrified when Nicky pointed his camera at ugly objects. When he argued that the ugliness of Japan was part of its unique quality, as much as its beauty, Diana replied that it was a moral responsibility to focus only on what was beautiful. “Her life insulated her from much that was difficult and ugly,” said Nicky. But when it was unavoidable, “she looked away.”

  After the Hollywood exhibition Diana returned to another subject close to her heart. American Women of Style, which coincided with the Bicentennial celebrations of 1976, was an exhibition of the great stylists who had animated and created fashion before the Second World War. André Leon Talley thought that it was her masterwork, “a true expression of her own personal history and tastes.” He particularly liked the fact that she included Josephine Baker in the show. “This was an important moment; no African-American woman had ever, until then, been placed in the same stylistic league as, say, Isadora Duncan.” As well as Duncan and Baker, the women in the exhibition included Rita Lydig, Elsie de Wolfe, Consuelo, Duchess of Marlborough, and Millicent Rogers. They all “created themselves,” said Diana. In one way or another, all the women included had inspired her. They met, said Stella Blum, “on the common ground of excellence,” and all of them “had an inordinate aesthetic sensitivity—a strong creative drive that looked for a perfect expression for their highly charged motivations.” American Women of Style was another box-office success, attracting numbers comparable to The Tens, the Twenties, the Thirties.

  The Glory of Russian Costume, which would break all box-office records, took place against the background of détente with the Soviet Union. It was one of a series of cultural exchanges arranged by Hoving and an “exuberantly corrupt” undersecretary in the Ministry of Culture on the Russian side. The exhibition could never have happened, wrote Hoving, without the involvement of Diana and the recently widowed Jacqueline Onassis, who had taken an editorial job at Viking Press. Diana, Fred Hughes, and Hoving went to Russia to discuss the show early in 1975. Diana told George Plimpton that her reaction to her new surroundings was love at first sight: “When I’d been in Russia for only forty-eight hours, I thought to myself: of all the countries I’ve known, if it were my country not to be able to come back to this one would be the most terrible.” Her enthusiastic reaction paid dividends. A meeting was arranged with Russian officials far too early for Diana, at nine o’clock in the morning the day after they arrived. She told Hoving to talk to them about “museumy” details like shipping and promised to appear at eleven o’clock. Tension mounted as Hoving managed to extend the “museumy” conversation to a full two hours. But Diana did not let him down. “A minute before eleven the door to the conference room opened and in she swept, radiant in crimson and shiny black, her hair pulled back so tightly it looked like a painted surface, neck arched.” Hoving knew she could see very little without her glasses, but realized she had taken them off for her grand entrance. “The Russians blinked first. ‘Ah, Mrs. Vreeland, what do you think of the Soviet Union?’ It was a kind of Last Judgment moment. Diana breathed deeply. ‘Ah marvelous! God! marvelous!’ she said. ‘I have been up walking since dawn, ab-so-lute-ly revelling in the vast beauty of this city. God, the women are so beautiful. I mean these complexions! The land is so vast. So . . . awe-in-spir-ing! So grand. The women are so gorgeous!’ ”

  While Hoving choked quietly in the corner at the idea of Diana on an early-morning walk, the Russians fell for her completely. After her peroration Diana was given everything she asked for. She was determined to find a peasant costume that she believed had been the inspiration for the Chanel suit during Chanel’s affair with Grand Duke Dmitri. “The item was triumphantly displayed for her. Diana had been right. There was the garment Chanel had clearly adapted for ‘her’ classic design,” said Hoving. By this time the Russians were hanging on Diana’s every word. She spent hours patiently sifting through hundreds of drawers, and thousands of costumes immaculately folded away in acid-free paper, impressing Hoving once again with her powers of concentration and her capacity for sheer hard work. “She would praise lavishly—and, in time, would criticize, very gently but with needle-like effect. By the time Diana Vreeland left the Soviet Union, she had become legend there, too.” Hoving returned to Russia again with Jacqueline Onassis, who was editing a book titled In the Russian Style to accompany the exhibition. The joint efforts of the two American czarinas persuaded the Russians to lend the winter sleigh of Princess Elizabeth, Catherine the Great’s wedding dress, and Peter the Great’s three-foot-high boots.

  The spirit of détente was rather less in evidence when the costumes finally arrived in New York, however, accompanied by several KGB agents and three Russian curators: Tamara Korshunova, costume curator at the Hermitage, in Leningrad; Luiza Efimova, costume curator at the State Historical Museum in Moscow, and Nina Yarmolovich, a costume restorer at the Kremlin Museums. If Diana “butted heads” with Stella Blum, she locked horns with her Russian counterparts. There was no getting around Russian insistence that the clothes must be behind glass; there was great concern about Diana’s idea that the dummies should be painted red; and complete bafflement at her wish to braid them with green and blue Dynel hair. At this point George Trow caught up with Diana again. “ ‘We have to—ummm—consult. The whole issue of the Dynel braids is being analyzed now.’ Mrs. Vreeland is not entirely used to the processes of consultation and analysis.” There was even greater consternation at Diana’s scorn for chronology. In the event the bemused Russian curators gave way, though not without great misgivings, shared by Stella Blum. “Stella took me around the exhibition the night before it opened and talked me through the way it ‘should’ have been done,” said Harold Koda.

  Diana was not greatly interested in the vernacular peasant clothes provided by the Russians. She solved the problem by grouping them together, where they made a brilliant display in two separate rooms, one for poorer peasant clothes and the other for clothes belonging to richer peasants, who used brocade and fur in place of coarse cotton. Ironically it was the embroidery, the ribbons, the vivid reds, the pearl detail, and the layering of these clothes that had the greatest impact on American designers, influencing the New York collections a short time later. For this exhibition Diana persuaded the house of Chanel to revive an old perfume, Cuir de Russie (Russian Leather), and went to work on a tape of Mussorgsky, Borodin, Rimsky-Korsakov, and Tchaikovsky. What the Russians made of Diana’s decision to throw furs around to give the idea of savagery is not recorded. But once again the exhibition was a blockbuster success, exceeding even the Hollywood show in terms of numbers. And a truce was finally achieved with the Russian curators once the exhibition opened. Diana took them out for a lunch where formidable quantities of alcohol were consumed and then invited them back to 550 Park Avenue for tea with Serge Obolensky, who had been a pageboy at the court of Czar Nicholas. This potentially disastrous encounter ended with all the Russians in one another’s arms.

  The committee for the Party of the Year that accompanied the Russian exhibition was led by Pat (Mrs. William) Buckley and included a shifting cast of social luminaries such as Leonore Annenberg, Lee Radziwill, and Gianni Agnelli. Once Jacqueline Onassis agreed to become president of the committee
, the party swelled again in size and social importance: “the biggest one of these things the museum has ever had,” according to Warhol, who went with Halston’s party in a fleet of limousines. The 650 guests paid $150 each for a reception and dinner at the museum, and about 1,000 more arrived after dinner to see the exhibition, paying $40 for the privilege. Outside, photographers and journalists lined up to report on the guests. Inside, Jacqueline Onassis received them with Oscar de la Renta, Douglas Dillon, and the chargé d’affaires from the Soviet embassy. Meanwhile, Marella Agnelli and Jacqueline de Ribes circulated in dresses on a Russian peasant theme, while C. Z. Guest, Lee Radziwill, Mica Ertegun, and Françoise de la Renta chose to sport ruffled taffeta dresses from de la Renta in the same vein. Diana spent part of the evening hawking In the Russian Style at top volume: “Buy a book! Buy a luvverly book!” The evening was regarded by almost everyone as her show. “The trick of having a regal New York social life is not to go to distinguished parties but to go to distinguished parties publicly,” said George Trow. “And in New York at the moment only Mrs. Vreeland has the skill to provide a public event with enough authority to withstand the dissolution implicit in publicity. For one night, she takes over the machinery abandoned by Caroline Astor and the machinery abandoned by Flo Ziegfeld and, combining them into one machine, she makes it go.”

  Chapter Nine

  Endgame

  This thing about being recognized in the street is truly fantastic. It amazes me every time.

  I mean, I’ve been recognized by cab drivers. These things are killer-dillers! I just can’t get over it. I’ve given this a lot of thought and I think that fashion must be even stronger than the lure of the stage.